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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 186 Now Available

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 186 Now Available

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Beneath Ceaseless Skies 186-smallAccording to several reliable sources (and even some photographs), BCS editor Scott H. Andrews was at the World Fantasy Convention two weeks ago. I know most of the editors in the field, but I’ve never met Scott, and that’s an oversight I’d like to correct some day. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make the con this year. Ah well! Next year for sure.

Issue #186 has short fiction from Bruce McAllister and Tamara Vardomskaya, and a podcast by Cory Skerry. It is cover-dated November 12.

“Holy Water, Holy Blood” by Bruce McAllister
He was comparing me, a peasant boy, to himself, a pope, but this did not feel strange. He wanted us to be friends — that I could tell — so why not make of us equals?

“The Guardian’s Head “by Tamara Vardomskaya
This bridge, I knew, was itself a sign of the empress’s faith in us. A permanent bridge expected the water to yield and hold back.

Audio Fiction Podcast:
“Bloodless” by Cory Skerry
But she wouldn’t let him make it through the gate; the inside guards were there to deal with travelers. Kamalija was here to deal with monsters.

Bruce McAllister has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Shirley Jackson Awards. Tamara Vardomskaya is a Canadian writer who has previously appeared at Tor.com. Cory Skerry’s last story for Beneath Ceaseless Skies was “Sinking Among Lilies” (Issue #92).

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New Treasures: Dead Ringers by Christopher Golden

New Treasures: Dead Ringers by Christopher Golden

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Dead Ringers-back-small Dead Ringers-small

Christopher Golden is one of the most popular horror writers on the market; Stephen King called his 2014 novel Snowblind “deeply scary.” His latest is a new twist of the legend of doppelgangers, and follows five people confronted with doubles. It’s available in hardcover from St. Martin’s Press.

When Tess Devlin runs into her ex-husband Nick on a Boston sidewalk, she’s furious at him for pretending he doesn’t know her. She calls his cell to have it out with him, only to discover that he’s in New Hampshire with his current girlfriend. But if Nick’s in New Hampshire… who did she encounter on the street?

Frank Lindbergh’s dreams have fallen apart. He wanted to get out of the grim neighborhood where he’d grown up and out of the shadow of his alcoholic father. Now both his parents are dead and he’s back in his childhood home, drinking too much himself. As he sets in motion his plans for the future, he’s assaulted by an intruder in his living room… an intruder who could be his twin.

In an elegant hotel, Tess will find mystery and terror in her own reflection. Outside a famed mansion on Beacon Hill, people are infected with a diabolical malice… while on the streets, an eyeless man, dressed in rags, searches for a woman who wears Tess’s face.

Dead Ringers was published by St. Martin’s Press on November 3, 2015. It is 310 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover, and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Ervin Serrano. See all our latest New Treasures here.

Future Treasures: Vendetta, a Deadly Curiosities Novel by Gail Z. Martin

Future Treasures: Vendetta, a Deadly Curiosities Novel by Gail Z. Martin

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Deadly Curiosities-small Deadly Curiosities Vendetta-small

Gail Z. Martin has a fine reputation among sword & sorcery fans, and I’ve followed her career with keen interest. She’s produced no less than three series in the last eight years: the four-volume Chronicles of the Necromancer, the two-volume Fallen Kings Cycle, and the Ascendant Kingdoms trilogy. She’s also the author of Iron and Blood, the opening book in a new steampunk series co-authored with her husband Larry N. Martin.

But I missed Deadly Curiosities, the first novel in her urban fantasy series set in Charlotte, North Carolina, when it came out last year. Which is a pity, because I think this might be her most appealing one yet. Following the proprietors of an antique shop whose owners track down and eliminate deadly artifacts, Deadly Curiosities revealed “a realistic underworld” (Publishers Weekly) and included “pirates and smugglers whose deaths are tied to the evil threatening the city… Martin is clearly in her element” (Fiction Vortex).

In the new volume Vendetta, on sale next month, Martin ratchets up the tension as Cassidy and Teag find themselves squaring off against an unknown enemy with strong magic, powerful resources… and a very long memory.

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Vintage Treasures: The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann

Vintage Treasures: The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann

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The Weirwoods-small The Weirwoods-back-small The Weirwoods 1977-small

We haven’t discussed Thomas Burnett Swann much here at Black Gate (a quick search pops up only one previous title, his 1972 paperback Wolfwinter). He is largely forgotten today.

His second novel, The Weirwoods, was serialized in two parts in Science Fantasy in 1965. It appeared in paperback from Ace Books in 1967 with a cover by Gray Morrow (above left, click for bigger version). The back cover of that edition is in the middle. It is a very slender novel, just 125 pages, with an original cover price of 50 cents. At right is the October 1977 Ace reprint, with a cover by Stephen Hickman.

Swann published some 16 novels, which together constitute a secret history of the magical races of classical mythology, starting in ancient Egypt in roughly 2500 BC, and the inexorable decline of magic in the face of the growth of Christianity and other world religions. The Weirwoods is set in the world of the Etruscans, the pre-Roman civilization that dominated Italy from 800 to 500 B.C., and tells the tale of nobleman Lars Velcha, whose city Sutrium sits beside the mysterious Weirwoods, home to witches, centaurs, fauns, water sprites, and far stranger things. When Velcha captures the weir-man Vel and makes him a slave, he triggers a war that brings disaster to his city.

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Clarkesworld 110 Now on Sale

Clarkesworld 110 Now on Sale

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Clarkesworld 110-smallMark Cole’s nonfiction article “You Wouldn’t Be Reading This If It Weren’t For Buck Rogers,” in the latest issue of Clarkesworld, is a fond look back at one of the most important characters in the history of science fiction, and the famous comic strip he spawned.

Buck got his start in a singularly dull novelette by Philip Nowlan, “Armageddon—2419 AD,” in the August 1928 Amazing Stories (its cover looks so much like the classic images of Buck that no one notices it illustrates E.E. “Doc” Smith’s story, Skylark of Space).

By now everyone knows the story: Rogers gets trapped in a mine filled with a mysterious radioactive gas and wakes up almost five hundred years later. But then it bogs down in endless descriptions of future technology, future history, and future language. Even the “exciting” action is told in a detached tone, more suitable for a history text than a pulp adventure.

Yet, within a year, it became one of the most popular comic strips ever.

Issue #110 of Clarkesworld has seven stories — five new, and two reprints — from Naomi Kritzer, Nin Harris, Sara Saab, Krista Hoeppner Leahy, Xia Jia, Tim Sullivan, and Ellen Kushner & Ysabeau S. Wilce.

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New Treasures: Domnall and the Borrowed Child by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

New Treasures: Domnall and the Borrowed Child by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

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Domnall and the Borrowed Child-back-small Domnall and the Borrowed Child-small

Click on the images for bigger versions.

Sylvia Spruck Wrigley’s short story “Alive, Alive Oh”, from the June 2013 issue of Lightspeed, was nominated for the Nebula Award. Her new novella Domnall and the Borrowed Child is the ninth title in Tor.com‘s novella series.

Domnall is a cranky old faerie, the only experienced scout left after the war with the sluagh. He remembers a time when his kind, the Scottish seelie fae, would dance fairy rings amongst the bluebells. Now the ruling council is too cowardly — and too afraid of humans — to do anything of the sort. But when a fae child falls ill, Domnall is the only one with the cunning and resources to get her the medicine she needs: Mother’s milk. But to get it, the old scout will face cunning humans, hungry wolves, and uncooperative sheep — and his fellow fae.

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Future Treasures: A Daughter of No Nation by A. M. Dellamonica

Future Treasures: A Daughter of No Nation by A. M. Dellamonica

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Child of a Hidden Sea-small A Daughter of No Nation-small

Child of a Hidden Sea, the first novel in A. M. Dellamonica’s new fantasy trilogy The Hidden Sea Tales, was published in hardcover last June. It introduced us to twenty-four-year-old Sophie Hansa, who found herself transported from a San Francisco alley into the warm and salty waters of Stormwrack, the magical world where her birth parents met. Stormwrack is a world of island nations with a variety of cultures — and where a hidden conspiracy could destroy everything she has just discovered. With the help of a sister she has never known, and a ship captain who would rather she had never arrived, she navigated the shoals of the highly charged politics of Stormwrack… until she found herself effectively deported from Stormwrack. You can read an excerpt at Tor.com, and the digital version is available now for just $2.99.

The second novel in the trilogy, A Daughter of No Nation, will be released from Tor Books on December 1. Here’s the plot synopsis, and a link to a brand new excerpt.

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The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in October

The Top 50 Black Gate Posts in October

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Terra Incognito A Guide to Building the Worlds of Your Imagination-smallWith his very first article for Black Gate, Richard C. White shot right to the top of the charts with the most popular article for the month, “World Building 101: The Village.” Here’s a sample:

Just because you have water doesn’t mean you can put any number of people in an area. The Cahokia Mounds in Illinois were believed to have held up to 40,000 people which would have made it the biggest city in North America until the 18th century. However, archeologists now believe the reason that Cahokia was abandoned was not due to warfare but because they had so many people that the water became too polluted to support the population. Even pioneers in the 19th century soon learned you can only dig a well so deep before it doesn’t provide enough water. An overabundance of people/livestock/ irrigation can cause a drought as easily as Mother Nature. So, when planning your village for your story, think about how do your people get their water and how they deal with waste water.

Coming in second was Fletcher Vredenburgh’s look back at one of the most popular fantasy novels of the 20th Century, “You Can’t Go Home Again: The Annotated Sword of Shannara: 35th Anniversary Edition by Terry Brooks.” The third most popular article last month was Derek Kunsken’s interview with Christopher Golden, Co-Author of Joe Golem, Occult Detective.

Rounding out the Top Five for the month were Goth Chick, with her look at Sony Pictures’ Freaks of Nature, and M Harold Page’s catalog of tips for those trying to write a novel this month, “NaNoWriMo is coming!”

The complete list of Top Articles for September follows. Below that, I’ve also broken out the most popular overall articles and blog categories for the month.

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Vintage Treasures: Great Short Novels of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg

Vintage Treasures: Great Short Novels of Science Fiction, edited by Robert Silverberg

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Great Short Novels of Science Fiction-back-small Great Short Novels of Science Fiction-small

I have a real fondness for novellas. Like many other readers, I think they’re the perfect length for SF and fantasy — long enough to develop and explore a fascinating new setting, but short enough to keep the narrative fast-paced and lean.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many outlets for novellas these days. Economic realities have squeezed the page counts of print magazines, and most online magazines don’t publish them at all (Rashida J. Smith’s GigaNotoSaurus being the notable exception). Perhaps that’s why I’ve been so excited by Tor.com‘s new novella line, which has already produced some terrific titles.

So I do find myself drawn to anthologies that include novellas… like my favorite book of the year (so far), The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas: 2015, Peter Crowther’s excellent Cities, and many others. But I do miss the days when folks like Robert Silverberg would produce mass market paperbacks collecting some of the best novellas from the top science fiction magazines, as he did in Great Short Novels of Science Fiction, a 95-cent Ballantine paperback from 1970.

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The Dark Issue 10 Now on Sale

The Dark Issue 10 Now on Sale

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The Dark Issue 10-smallThe Dark is a quarterly magazine co-edited by Jack Fisher and Sean Wallace. The tenth issue features four all-original short stories:

“The Devil Under the Maison Blue” by Michael Wehunt
“The Canary” by Lisa L. Hannett
“Self, Contained” by Kirstyn McDermott
“What Hands Like Ours Can Do” by Megan Arkenberg

You can read issues free online, or help support the magazine by subscribing to the ebook editions, available for the Kindle and Nook in Mobi and ePub format. Issues are around 50 pages, and priced at $2.99 through Amazon, B&N.com, Apple, Kobo, and other fine outlets. A one-year sub (six issues) is just $15 – subscribe today.

If you enjoy the magazine you can also support it by buying their books, reviewing stories, or even just leaving comments. Read issue 10 here, and see their complete back issue catalog here.

The cover for the November issue is by NKMandic.

The issue is cover dated November 2015. We last covered The Dark with Issue 9.

See our November Fantasy Magazine Rack here, and all of our recent Magazine coverage here.